Before you start
Name the decision.
Are you deciding what to discover, build or release? Agree that first, then choose the smallest useful planning view.
Different teams, shared direction
There’s more than
one way to plan.
Start with the conversation your team needs. Keep the useful structure and leave the ceremony behind.
Bring the right people
Make the trade-off together.
Invite people who know the customer, system and constraints. A shared assumption is easier to challenge than a hidden one.
Keep it useful
Review, don’t recreate.
Keep a short cadence. Update the evidence, move the work and leave the discussion in the same place for next time.
Customer stories
Three teams, three ways of planning.
Halsgrove Health
Product · 38 people · Start → Team
Three planning meetings became one.
The product team kept priorities in a spreadsheet that only two people edited. They moved the backlog in an afternoon, scored the top twenty initiatives together and now run a single 30-minute review each Wednesday.
- planning meetings a fortnight
- 3 → 1
- initiatives scored in week one
- 20
Imelda Fenwright, Head of Product
Tarnwell Freight
Engineering · 54 people · Team
Dates that engineering signs off.
Release dates used to leave sales calls before anyone checked capacity. The engineering managers now set weekly capacity per squad, and nothing gets a date until it fits.
- of releases landed in the planned week
- 92%
- late-scope changes a quarter
- 6 → 2
Rukmini Aster, Engineering Manager
Brackenside Learning
Operations · 120 people · Scale
Four teams, one roadmap.
Course operations, support, product and engineering each kept their own list. A shared stage vocabulary and one owner per initiative let them plan in one place without losing team ownership.
- teams on a shared roadmap
- 4
- fewer duplicate requests
- 35%
Stellan Brannagh, Operations Lead
Planning across more than 75 people?
See the Scale plan